RON ARAD

Arad’s Big Easy chair was first created in 1988, using welded steel. “I was thinking about an over-stuffed club chair”. An armchair of imposing dimensions, made up of soft lines, two large armrests and sinuous shapes, the form is a powerful statement on volume and illusion, blurring the distinction between furniture and sculpture. The design has, since its inception, been made in many versions. The latest one, revisited especially for Opera Gallery, is the Big Easy in Crystalline Resin, cast in transparent resin, tinted and blotted by colors and hues.

Cast in gold, pink, red, green, yellow, blue and black resin is Arad’s version of Henri Matisse’s famous 1953 collage work, “The Snail”. In Arad’s version, the blank space of Matisse’s work — the white paper, where no coloured paper was glued down — is made into empty space: this is a work that can be peered through; that can be viewed from all directions. But he has also altered Matisse’s composition. In the place of the block, one-dimensional forms of the collage, Arad has hollowed out spaces in each colour. Ever one to prise both beauty and utility, Arad has made this piece fully functional.

Extract from the Curatorial Essay by Francesca Peacock

The “Little Albert” is a smaller, denser form than the “Big Easy”. Initially made in 2000 for the “Victoria and Albert” collection, the chair has a small footprint, but still manages to pack a considerable punch. The collection was named for the retrospective held at the iconic London-based Victorian museum in 2000.

With its solid base, and curving back that rises almost seamlessly from the bottom, resin version of the “Little Albert” is a masterful play with light, refraction, and colour. In the lower part of the chair the colours are intense, dark, and overlapping, whilst, at the top, they become translucently clear and pure.

Extract from the Curatorial Essay by Francesca Peacock

Unlike many of Arad’s works which are made from one singular form, curved and shaped into the ideal structure, the Tuba Sofa is made from nine discrete cylindrical tubes, each of which has been cut in different ways at the centre to make a seat. When approached from one end, the resin tubes look like logs of wood, artfully arranged and stacked on top of each other; each one is not hollow, but contains a kaleidoscopic world of colour and shining patterns. But, from front on, the seat looks more like a wave, as its space has been carved out; a hollow made where there was previously none.

Extract from the Curatorial Essay by Francesca Peacock

With its mesmerising refractions and endless variations in colour, it is wonderful to trace the table’s heritage back to Arad’s earliest days of furniture-making. Just a year after the first metal version of the “Big Easy”, Arad made “Two legs and a table” in the same, highly-polished stainless steel. A flat surface — in an undulating, curved shape — sits on two cylindrical legs. The original version is a masterpiece of space and form: the whole is hollow, and there isn’t a part of the table that doesn’t have space inside it. For all its thinness and delicacy — Arad likens working with this metal to working with “skin” — there’s a distinct solidity to the table, as it sits on its wide-based legs.

With the coffee table, this solidity is increased: the whole form is squatter, but no less wide across the top. But, now cast in resin, the hollowness has been changed: in the place of empty space between the metal is the dancing light and changing colours.

Extract from the Curatorial Essay by Francesca Peacock

« Designers will tell you that I am an artist and not a designer. Artists will tell you that I am a designer and not an artist. I personally subscribe to what Oscar Wilde said. ‘There are two kinds of people, charming and tedious.’ And I think there are two kinds of things, things that are exciting and interesting and things that are not. Is it art? Is it design? I don’t care.»

Ron Arad was born in 1951 in Tel-Aviv. He studied at the Jerusalem Academy of Art and later at the Architectural Association in London. In 1981, he co-founded with Caroline Thorman the design and production studio One Off Ltd, which notable early successes were the Rover Chair and the Big Easy. In 1989, he established Ron Arad Associates, an architecture and design practice, and soon after, Ron Arad Architects. Between 1994 and 2009, he was a professor at the Royal College of Art in London.

Ron Arad is an innovative and daring visual artist: manipulation, transformation and experimenta- tion are the key words of the spirit in his creations. He never ceases to test the potential of mate- rials, using them in unconventional ways to obtain unprecedented aesthetic effects.

Ron Arad designs furniture and objects for many leading international companies including Vitra, Moroso, Driade, Alessi, Kartell or Magis. As an architect, he has conceived the new opera house in Tel Aviv and a show room for Maserati in Modena among others. He has designed a number of public art pieces, including the Vortext in Seoul or the Kesher sculpture at the Tel Aviv university. He is the recipient of numerous awards and his work has been exhibited in prestigious museums worldwide such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris or the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.